Hello Simon, <div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 11:59, Simon McVittie <<a href="mailto:simon.mcvittie@collabora.co.uk">simon.mcvittie@collabora.co.uk</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 On Wed, 30 Jun 2010 at 20:43:10 -0700, Dylan McCall wrote: > On a more serious note, though, I was imagining that in the context of > tubes a while ago. Indeed, it doesn't really fit the style of > Telepathy, but I can picture a turn-based game or collaboration app > working transparently through email. In that case it supports an > indefinite time delay, so one can stop what he's doing, come back > later and be dropped back at the previous state in the “conversation.” Telepathy is a real-time communication framework. Doing a Tubes sort of thing by e-mail might be more appropriate than Telepathy's Tubes for some applications, but that's not Telepathy any more :-) Similarly, it would be entirely possible to have a UI that mixes e-mails with real-time communication, and indeed microblogging and blogging. I think that's outside the scope of Telepathy, but I'd encourage that sort of UI to use Telepathy for the real-time bits! The reason there's mail notification in Telepathy is that some services (Google Talk, MSN) provide it as a side-effect of having online presence. If Empathy was a single monolithic client (like Pidgin or whatever), we'd be forced to choose between displaying the information in Empathy or discarding it, even though Empathy doesn't really have anything to do with e-mail. However, because of Telepathy's architecture, we can take an intermediate approach, which is to signal it on D-Bus and let a more appropriate UI deal with it. That doesn't make Telepathy an appropriate way to get mail notification from generic mail servers (IMAP/POP3) - for those, there's nothing of interest to Telepathy, just mail notification, so the UI should just talk to the server itself. I believe Ubuntu's messaging indicator either behaves like this, or will do so in future. </blockquote></div> Thank you for your assessment ;)